[AR] Re: arocket Digest V1 #30
- From: Henry Spencer <henry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 23:20:00 -0400 (EDT)
On Wed, 9 Oct 2013, Douglas Messier wrote:
> Musk has played the underdog role here so well to the point where people
> are really rooting for him and excuse problems on the launch vehicle and
> spacecraft that would have gotten others a lot more criticism. Stages
> rolling, engines blowing apart, thruster pods not working, engines failing
> to light, sensors getting confused by too much sunlight off JEMS. You never
> know what's going to go wrong next. Imagine things like that going wrong on
> ULA rockets or Japanese and European cargo ships and see if people would be
> that forgiving.
Like, say, a cargo ship needing nearly a month to go from launch to ISS,
because assorted problems came up along the way? Lest we forget, that was
Jules Verne, the first of ESA's ATV freighters, and it hardly made the
news, let alone becoming a bone of contention.
As for whether ULA would be forgiven such a thing, consider that there was
a commercial payload on the very first Delta IV, even though its immediate
predecessor, Delta III, had a dismal record consisting entirely of two
total failures and one questionable success. I'm sure Eutelsat got a deep
discount for being daring, but even so, yes, people do seem to have been
quite forgiving, actually.
It's SpaceX, in fact, that gets all the innuendos suggesting that they
don't really know what they're doing. There's never any question about
whether ESA or Boeing is going to be forgiven, perhaps after a bit of
token penance; they aren't allowed to fail.
Henry Spencer
henry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx)
(regexpguy@xxxxxxxxx)
Other related posts:
